False Memory in Adults With ADHD: A Comparison Between Subtypes and Normal Controls

To examine the performance on the Deese-Roediger-McDermott task of adults divided into ADHD subtypes and compares their performance to that of healthy controls to examine whether adults with ADHD are more susceptible to the production of false memories under experimental conditions.

A total of 128 adults with ADHD (50% females), classified into three Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed.; DSM-IV-TR) subtypes, were compared with 48 controls.

The results indicated that the ADHD participants recalled and recognized fewer studied words than the controls, the ADHD groups produced more false memories than the control group, no differences in either the false positives or the false negatives. The ADHD-combined (ADHD-CT) group recognized significantly more critical words than the control, ADHD-predominantly inattentive (ADHD-IA), and ADHD-predominantly hyperactive-impulsive (ADHD-HI) groups. The ADHD groups recalled and recognized more false positives, were more confident in their false responses, and displayed more knowledge corruption than the controls. The ADHD-CT group recalled and recognized more false positives than the other ADHD groups.

The adults with ADHD have more false memories than the controls and that false memory formation varied with the ADHD subtypes.